A primary function of a vehicular power system is to generate, regulate, and distribute power (e.g., electricity) to vehicle systems. The vehicular power system may also be configured to provide safety guarantees in the presence of faults and other contingencies. Load and system management becomes increasingly complex as a number of vehicle power subsystems increases.
For complex systems (i.e., systems with many independent loads), power demand at a given time is difficult to predict. Certain prior control methods have focused on capabilities of generating units and have used load shedding as a means to avoid overload conditions and to maintain service to high priority loads. To implement load shedding, loads may be “ranked” according to a priority list and, when an overload condition is present or imminent, one or more loads may be shed (e.g., dropped or shut down) based on the priority list. Load shedding is easy to implement and requires little computational overhead; however, due to the simplicity of the load shedding process a configuration of loads and sources operated by a vehicular power system at a particular time may be sub optimal.